DESCRIPTION

getline()
reads an entire line from stream,
storing the address of the buffer containing the text into
*lineptr.
The buffer is null-terminated and includes the newline character, if
one was found.

If
*lineptr
is NULL, then
getline()
will allocate a buffer for storing the line,
which should be freed by the user program.
(The value in
*n
is ignored.)

Alternatively, before calling
getline(),
*lineptr
can contain a pointer to a
malloc(3)-allocated
buffer
*n
bytes in size.
If the buffer is not large enough to hold the line,
getline()
resizes it with
realloc(3),
updating
*lineptr
and
*n
as necessary.

In either case, on a successful call,
*lineptr
and
*n
will be updated to reflect the buffer address and allocated size respectively.

getdelim()
works like
getline(),
except a line delimiter other than newline can be specified as the
delimiter
argument.
As with
getline(),
a delimiter character is not added if one was not present
in the input before end of file was reached.

RETURN VALUE

On success,
getline()
and
getdelim()
return the number of characters read, including the delimiter character,
but not including the terminating null byte.
This value can be used
to handle embedded null bytes in the line read.

Both functions return -1 on failure to read a line (including end of file
condition).

ERRORS

EINVAL

Bad arguments
(n
or
lineptr
is NULL, or
stream
is not valid).

VERSIONS

These functions are available since libc 4.6.27.

CONFORMING TO

Both
getline()
and
getdelim()
were originally GNU extensions.
They were standardized in POSIX.1-2008.